Syrian pilot defects in MiG-21

Jordan grants him asylum;Assad’s regime calls officer a traitor

— The pilot of a warplane who had been reported missing by Syrian air force authorities during a training mission Thursday flew to neighboring Jordan where he sought and was granted asylum, and Syria denounced him as a traitor.

It was the first time since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began 16 months ago that a Syrian air force officer defected with a commandeered aircraft. Some military analysts in the region said the move set a potentially perilous precedent, raising questions about the cohesiveness of the air force.

Army defectors have swelled rebel ranks virtually since the earliest days of the armed uprising.

Jordan’s information minister, Sameeh Maaytah, said the pilot of the MiG-21 made an emergency landing at a Jordanian military air base and asked for political asylum. After a Cabinet meeting, the request was granted, he said.

News reports said the pilot had landed in Mafraq, a northern town near the border with Syria.

An anti-Assad activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the pilot flew the plane into Jordan after having refused orders to bomb targets in Syria. The source of the activist’s information was not immediately known.

Syria’s official news agency, SANA, at first reported the warplane was on a training flight when contact was lost with the pilot, identified as Col. Hassan Hammadeh. Later in the day when news of his asylum request became widely known, SANA quoted a Defense Ministry statement as confirming the pilot had landed in Jordan and was “a deserter and a traitor to his country and military honor, and will be punished accordingly.”

The statement said Syrian officials had contacted the Jordanians to recover the aircraft.

The defection was reported as anti-Assad activists said fighting had escalated across the country.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britishgroup with contacts inside Syria, said 114 people had been killed, the biggest oneday toll since a U.N.-brokered cease-fire took effect two months ago and which has now been all but abandoned.

It was impossible to verify the group’s tally, which included 32 dead in Homs and 29 in Daraa, bastions of the anti-Assad resistance.

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross said a convoy trying to reach the old city in Homs, in western Syria, was forced by gunfire to turn back Thursday. Relief workers in the convoy from the Red Cross and the Red Crescent have been seeking for several days to evacuate sick people, women and children from Homs. Hicham Hassan, a spokesman for the Red Cross, said the convoy would still attempt to enter Homs but he could not say when.

Assad’s air force is one of the largest in the Middle East, with nearly 500 warplanes, nearly 200 training aircraft and nearly 200 helicopters, according to a tally compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based research group.

In the conflict with armed rebels, Syria’s government had avoided using the air force until recent weeks, fearing its deployment might prompt Western calls for a no-fly zone.

Authorities also were reluctant to give the impression that they had lost control onthe ground, analysts said.

Most pilots in the Syrian air force belong to the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, who also form the backbone of the resistance, and there were fears that some of them might defect.

But this spring the use of the air force was increased, particularly helicopters to attack rebel holdouts and to counter improvements in the rebels’ limited firepower.

A retired Lebanese officer, Gen. Elias Hanna, an expert on Syrian military capabilities, said while most pilots were Sunnis, their commanders were from the minority Alawites who have provided the power base of the ruling Assad family for the past four decades.

Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, who died 12 years ago, had been an air force officer.

In a telephone interview, Hanna called the reported defection “a psychological blow to the regime” since Damascus “had started losing his grip on the armed forces and now it’s losing its grip on the air force.”

“This signals the erosion of the regime’s capacity to use all its forces, the idea of sending planes is no longer an option, neither against an internal or an external enemy,” Hanna said.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland called Hammadeh “very courageous” for leaving on a plane worth some $25 million. She and Pentagon spokesman George Little called for moredefections.

Russia’s foreign minister, meanwhile, lashed out Thursday at Britain for pressuring a Russian-operated ship heading to Syria with a load of weapons to turn back, saying that Moscow won’t abide by European Union sanctions against its Arab ally.

Sergey Lavrov said a British insurer’s decision to remove the ship’s coverage reflected the “unreliability of the British insurance system.” He also said the British government defied international law by asking the insurance company to act.

Elsewhere in the Mideast, Egypt’s main Islamist groups called for protests after prayers today against moves by the ruling generals to expand their powers, as a delay in presidential election results added to political tensions.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq both say they won the ballot. The Brotherhood organized the rally after the army last week issued a decree stripping the presidency of much of its power.

Information for this article was contributed by Ranya Kadri, Dalal Mawad, Ellen Barry, J. David Goodman, Rick Gladstone and Hwaida Saad of The New York Times; by Bradley Klapper and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press; and by Mariam Fam, Tarek El-Tablawy, Ahmed El-Sayed, Ahmed Namatalla and Alaa Shahine of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 06/22/2012

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